What you have all been waiting for - pictures

These are pictures from my arrival at McMurdo.

9 Nov 09

I think it was a C117 that I flew from Christchurch NZ to McMurdo. 5.5 hrs in a jump seat on the side of the plane.

My plane arriving.

10 Nov 09

These next pictures are from Happy Camp "Survival school". About 20 hours of camping in the snow and another 10 of classes. It started as a beautiful day around 14 deg F and a light wind.

Prepping to build camp.

The supplies to build camp are at least partially what is in the survival bags. There are survival bags are on all flights and in all the vehicles.

We learned how to set up the tents with our gloves on, build a quinsy with our bags (that is the big mound of snow) you dig the bags out and you have a shelter. Plus set up a kitchen to feed ourselves hot food and drinks.

Building camp

Our ice block quarry.

The wind wall that I helped build. Isn't it great?

Hope you all enjoyed the pictures!

So we had a wonderful day to set up but about 6:00 pm the weather started to change, by 8 pm it was cold and the wind was blowing, absolutely miserable. It got down to around 5 deg F and a 15 mph wind. I ended up with very minor frostbite on two of my fingers.

I stayed the night in one of the scot tents; those are the large yellow ones. It never got warm in there, I had on a bunch of clothes and stayed burrowed into my sleeping bag all night. I was never really comfortable but, I did survive. So I hope I never need the skills they taught us at Happy camp but there is at least a chance I could survive with a survival kit for a little while.